Alasdair Plambeck and his wife ended their podcast Far Out after four and a half years and hundreds of episodes. Not because it was failing. Not because they’d run out of ideas or burned out on the work. They stopped because, as Plambeck describes it, the show had done what it came to do:

There was a pretty deep intuition that was kind of painful because it had become a part of our life and one we love so much. We had to let that go and reabsorb that energy and then just stay in that in-between and see what wanted to happen next.

The word that sticks is “painful.” This wasn’t relief. It wasn’t the easy exhale of finally quitting something that wasn’t working. It was the harder thing—recognizing that something you love has completed its arc, and that staying would mean something different than continuing.

Podcasters talk constantly about when to quit. The advice is always framed around failure: if you’re not growing, if you’ve lost the spark, if the metrics have flatlined, if you dread hitting record. These are all signals that something isn’t working, and the counsel is usually about giving yourself permission to stop.

But what about when it is working? What about when the show has done exactly what you hoped—connected you with people, forced important conversations, built something real—and you sense that its work is complete?

Plambeck describes how he and his wife approached individual episodes: “We’ll go until we feel that the energy is gone and then we’ll stop.” Some ran shorter, some longer. They learned to sense when a conversation had said what it needed to say. Then they applied the same principle to the show itself.

This raises a question that most podcasting advice never touches: How do you know when a podcast is finished?

Not abandoned. Not failed. Finished. The way a book is finished, or a season, or a chapter of your life. Complete in a way that means adding more would dilute rather than extend.

There’s no metric for this. Download numbers won’t tell you. Neither will listener feedback or sponsorship revenue or any of the external signals podcasters usually watch. The completion Plambeck describes is internal—a “deep intuition” that the energy has shifted, that what the show was for has been accomplished, that staying would become a different act than continuing.

Maybe this is why so few podcasts end intentionally. We don’t have language for creative completion in a medium that treats consistency as the highest virtue. “Keep going” is the default advice. Podfading is discussed as a failure of discipline. The podcaster who stops is assumed to have given up, not finished.

But Plambeck’s experience suggests another possibility: that some podcasts have natural lifespans, and the skill isn’t just knowing how to keep going but knowing how to recognize an ending when it arrives. That the painful intuition—the one that says this thing you love has done its work—might be worth listening to.

The question remains open. For podcasters still in the middle of their shows, it might be worth asking: What would “finished” even look like? And would you recognize it if it came?

This field note references the PodTalk podcast episode “Transition with Alasdair Plambeck,” published March 19, 2024.